Using a public repo, I want to get my master branch back to a certain commit from the past. I have reviewed the options and the best thing for me looks to be a simple checkout to the desired commit, then commit to the master branch. However when I do the checkout it does not remove some files that have been added into master after the specified commit hash.
So for example, if I want to get back to commit aaa1
:
$ cd working-copy-top-dir
$ git checkout master
$ git checkout -- .
$ git clean -fd
$ git checkout aaa1 .
$ git clean -fd
But at this point some files added after aaa1
are still in the working copy. What is the checkout
command to get the working copy data back how it was at aaa1
?
$ git --version
git version 2.7.2.windows.1
git checkout does not affect untracked files. Git only manages tracked files, and it works fairly hard to avoid letting you lose data (which is critical).
Force a Checkout You can pass the -f or --force option with the git checkout command to force Git to switch branches, even if you have un-staged changes (in other words, the index of the working tree differs from HEAD ). Basically, it can be used to throw away local changes.
The git checkout command lets you navigate between the branches created by git branch . Checking out a branch updates the files in the working directory to match the version stored in that branch, and it tells Git to record all new commits on that branch.
The easiest way to delete a file in your Git repository is to execute the “git rm” command and to specify the file to be deleted. Note that by using the “git rm” command, the file will also be deleted from the filesystem.
When you used git checkout aaa1 .
, you told Git to translate aaa1
to a commit, find that commit (more precisely, its tree), and copy every file in that commit to your index / staging area and work-tree.
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you start with master
containing two files, README
and hello
:
$ git checkout master
[output snipped]
$ ls
README hello
$ cat README
Yay, you read me!
$ cat hello
world
$
Let's say further that commit aaa1
exists and has two files in it, README
and addendum
. Its README
says Thank you for reading.
Let's do that checkout:
$ git checkout aaa1 -- .
[output snipped]
$ ls
README addendum hello
(I added the --
: it's not actually required here, but it's good practice.) The contents of README
are the updated README
. The file addendum
has also been extracted. The file hello
is not removed and remains unchanged from the version found in master
. The updated README
and hello
are staged:
$ git status --short
M README
A addendum
but hello
is not removed:
$ git ls-files --stage
100644 ac6f2cf1acbe1b6f11c7be2288fbae72b982823c 0 README
100644 7ddf1d71e0209a8512fe4862b4689d6ff542bf99 0 addendum
100644 cc628ccd10742baea8241c5924df992b5c019f71 0 hello
Using git clean
, even with -x
, will have no effect: nothing needs cleaning; there are no unstaged files (hello
is staged, it's just not modified).
You specifically wanted to get the work-tree to match commit aaa1
, byte for byte. To do that, you must find files that are in the index now, but were not in aaa1
, and remove them.
There is, however, an easier way: just remove everything. Then, use your git checkout aaa1 -- .
to extract everything from aaa1
. This will fill in the index and work-tree from aaa1
: any files that need to be restored to the way they were before removing, are restored (to the way they were in aaa1
which is the same as the way they are in HEAD
). Any files that need to be changed to match the way they were in aaa1
, are restored (to the way they were in aaa1
which is different).
$ git rm -rf .
rm 'README'
rm 'addendum'
rm 'hello'
$ git checkout aaa1 -- .
$ git ls-files --stage
100644 ac6f2cf1acbe1b6f11c7be2288fbae72b982823c 0 README
100644 7ddf1d71e0209a8512fe4862b4689d6ff542bf99 0 addendum
$ git status --short
M README
A addendum
D hello
You can now commit and you will have a new commit on master
that, regardless of what was there before, has exactly the same tree as aaa1
.
(Whether this is a good idea is another thing entirely, but it will get you the desired state.)
Do you want to roll back your repo to that state? Or you just want your local repo to look like that?
See https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reset for git reset.
CASE 1: if you do
git reset --hard [commit hash]
It will make your local code and local history be just like it was at that commit. But then if you wanted to push this to someone else who has the new history, it would fail.
CASE 2: if you do
git reset --soft [commit hash]
It will make your local files changed to be like they were then, but leave your history etc. the same.
I found answer here. Also you can see related answer here.
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